The Pact of nothingness

PalmaI read the latest headline about the Government's Pact for Sustainability and I am left open-mouthed: ‘The Pact for sustainability places innovation and knowledge as requirements for economic diversification’. The Pact met on Thursday to reach this empty, topical, boring, uncommitted conclusion, without any shred of imagination, ambiguous... Nothingness, in short. Innovation and knowledge can be the requirements for anything: for a restaurant's recipes, for new hair loss prevention products, or for a new model of robot vacuum cleaner.

That is why, from here, I want to send my congratulations to the participants of the meeting for the great intellectual effort they made to determine that innovation and knowledge are requirements for diversification. It was a question heard on the street: “What must be the requirements for diversification?”, asked a lady at the bus stop and a young man leaving school. Now we know: with these politicians in charge, we will not diversify in three centuries. And, when we are ready, the apocalypse will have passed over everything and it will no longer be necessary to do so.

I went to the presentation of the Government's Pact for Sustainability on May 22, 2024. I am sorry to have been right, but back then I thought that it was nothingness. Hundreds of people, most with business interests favorable to mass tourism, spouting a string of clichés, some politicians showing themselves off as superheroes without having done anything yet, and an economic guru enjoying his minute of glory. Smoke, smoke, smoke. So much smoke that my eyes almost watered. Later I went to the presentation of the super-document that was supposed to transform the economic model of the Islands: a good waste of glossy paper, full of colorful dots and with the usual clichés in black and white. Nothing new.

Later I watched the trickle of civic entities that preferred to leave rather than waste more time with speeches and more speeches about nothingness. There are basic differences that are sometimes forgotten: talking is not doing, saying that you want to do something is not executing. But listening over and over and over again to the same truisms can become unbearable. The model has not transformed, nor is it transforming, nor will it transform. Sometimes, you have to make it look like everything is changing so that everything stays the same. That is what the rich and powerful like.